Survey of Hinduism - A Great Recollection

INTRODUCTION 13
can be found throughout the subcontinent. They are in varying degrees influenced
by Hindu culture and often have lost their own languages, but they, in
turn, have also contributed to the development of Hinduism. Many castes—
especially among the lower ones—were formed by assimilating tribes to Hindu
society. Many local Hindu traditions can be linked to tribal origins: tribal
forms of deities merged into larger Hindu gods, tribal places of worship and
sacred spots were taken over by Hinduism as tīrthas and places where Hindu
temples were built. 17 In a countermove to the so-called Sanskritization—a
term coined by the sociologist M. N. Srinivas to describe the trend among low
castes and tribals to heighten their status by employing Brahmin priests and
by adopting high-caste rituals—a reassertion of tribal culture is taking place in
India. To some extent this is the result of a deliberate policy encouraged by the
Central Government, to protect the cultures of the tribes. It also is a reaction
against what tribals perceived to be Hindu aggressiveness and exploitation. It
is worth noting that tribals are in the forefront of India’s ecological movement;
they initiated the Chipko movement to protect the forests in the Himalayan
foothills, and they launched massive and effective protests against the Narmada
development scheme.
Furthermore, an estimated two hundred million Indians are and are
not Hindus. These are the people whom Gandhi had called Harijan, “God’s
People,” and who were otherwise known as outcastes, scheduled castes, or
Untouchables. Strictly speaking they had no rights within traditional Hindu
society, but they lived and functioned at the margins of it. 18 They even patterned
their own society along caste structures, observing higher and lower,
clean and unclean among themselves. Under Dr. Ambedkar, as a Māhār a
member of one of the scheduled castes, several million outcastes abandoned
Hinduism and adopted Buddhism as their religion. Many are by now organized
under the banner of Dalit, “oppressed,” associations; some of these are virulently
anti-Brahmin, attacking in their publications also the notion of a unified
Hinduism and of a cultural Hindu identity of India.
The Indian government made special provisions for the “scheduled castes”
by reserving places in schools and positions in government for them. Some
have done economically fairly well. The majority, however, still live on the
margins of Hindu society—quite literally so. Atrocities against Harijans are
still quite commonplace and a caste-Hindu backlash is noticeable against what
is seen as “pampering” of the “scheduled castes” by the government. In connection
with recommendations on their behalf by the Mandal Commission, this
led to riots and self-immolation by caste Hindus some years ago.
India is a large country and has always contained a considerable part of
the earth’s population, roughly one-sixth at present. India’s civilization in all
its aspects—material, intellectual, artistic, spiritual—is a major component
of world civilization and has been so for the past five thousand years at least.
Learning about India widens our horizons and makes us better understand
what it means to be human and civilized.